The Ovi Maps Route Race At SXSW

Day 3 of SXSW and the brilliant folks at WOM World had something incredibly awesome planned – the Ovi Maps Route Race. The idea was simple – navigate around Austin with Ovi Maps. The fun part was that we were going to be doing it on Segways and on a ‘confrence bike’. The experience was incredible, but that’s not really why I am writing this post. It is to share the navigation experience.

As you are aware, Ovi Maps navigation just went free worldwide for quite a number of devices, including the N97 and that’s the Nokia we used today. Austin, Texas dosen’t have many tall buildings and today was a clear day – perfect conditions for a good GPS connection so the N97 had no problems keeping a lock.

A route was already planned using the http://maps.ovi.com/ page and then sync’ed to the N97 from within the Ovi Maps app. This is important, because in a new city you could sit back at the hotel, ask for the city’s landmarks and then put them in your route and give yourself a nice tour.

Once we got navigating we realised that Ovi Maps has amazing accuracy, it won’t just stop navigating near the landmark we’d set, but it would only stop when we were exactly there. This caused a lot of delays in our trip as we had to wait for everyone to checkin before moving on, but if I were on my own I’m sure I’d appreciate that.

Since the route was already sync’d in, we just had to select it to get going. Like it is while using driving navigation, the app would recalculate when we missed a turn or over shot it. The audio directions were clear and perfectly timed. To sum it up, we used Ovi Maps to use create a route, sync it, follow it and reach our destination- all without much fuss and for free. I will have to say it delivered. What more could you ask for? Bettter search perhaps?